You have an excellent website, and you're probably curious as to who has been
looking at it. Where did they come from? What were they looking for? What do
you have on your site that they are interested in?

Installed on your account is a stats page, accessible by going to http://www.yourdomain.com/stats

Each night, a program running on our servers called Webalizer takes all the
information left by visitors to your site, and compiles a nice little page complete
with piecharts, graphs, and lists of all the things you might like to know about
your viewers.

When you first visit the stats page, you'll be given a chart of the total hits
in the past year.

Click on the particular month you'd like to see, to view the detailed logs
for that particular month.

But what do they all mean?

Hits

Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'. The
requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI
scripts, etc... Each valid line in the server log is counted as a hit. This
number represents the total number of requests that were made to the server
during the 24 hour period.

Files

Some requests made to the server, require that the server then send something
back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this
happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship
between 'hits' and 'files' can
be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.

Pages

Pages are, well, pages! Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates
an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other
stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc...
This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include
the other 'stuff' that is in the page. What actually constitutes a 'page' can
vary from server to server. The default action is to treat anything with the
extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page. A lot of sites will
probably define other extensions, such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl' as pages
as well. Some people consider this number as the number of 'pure' hits... I'm
not sure if I totally agree with that viewpoint. Some other programs (and people
:) refer to this as 'Pageviews'.

Sites

Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced
by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites'
number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during
the 24 hour period. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users
(real people) that visited, which is impossible to determine using just logs
and the HTTP protocol (however, this number might be about as close
as you will get).

Visits

Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address (site), the
amount of time since a previous request by the address
is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured
'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before),
it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the
site, and the IP address). The default timeout value is 30
minutes (can be changed), so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon,
and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered.
Note: in the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total should be discounted on 'Grouped'
records, and thought of as the "Minimum number of visits" that came
from that grouping instead.

Note: Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for
any request whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType option.
Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors,
this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be
considered a pretty close "guess".

KBytes

The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent
out by the server during the previous 24 hours. This value is generated directly
from the log file, so it is up to the web server to produce accurate numbers
in the logs. In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of
the amount of outgoing traffic the server had, regardless of the web servers
reporting quirks.

Note: A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 :)

Top Entry and Exit Pages

The Top Entry and Exit tables give a rough estimate of what URL's are used to
enter your site, and what the last pages viewed are.
Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc... this number
should be considered a good "rough guess" of the actual
numbers, however will give a good indication of the overall trend in where users
come into, and exit, your site. Remember, people don't always follow a linear
path when viewing websites. A search engine usually takes people directly to
the page with the most revelant content, which is not necessarily your opening
page.

Top Referrers

This gives you a breakdown of where your users are coming from. If you have
friends that have links on their pages to your site, this is where you would
look to see if people are actually using those links. If you've bought a banner
ad on a site somewhere, this is where you would check to see if it's working.
These results are generally surprising, as you'll never guess where your site
is sometimes mentioned.

Top Search String

This is another section that want to pay particular attention to if your site
advertizes any products or services. You want people to find you, and this will
tell you what people are putting into a search engine to come up with your site.
This can help you tailor your meta tags, or even add or remove content depending
on what they are finding. Say you have a site that sells plastic oranges. In
this section, you'd probably see things like "fake orange" or "plastic
fruit."